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If it’s that stressful, it’s not sustainable

Possum, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I’m a driven person, but every once in a while, I’ll get myself into a situation where I’ve pushed the accelerator too hard for too long. The chassis is shaking, there’s black smoke streaming from the exhaust and I’m gunning for a breakdown. It’s time for me to stop.

The artists who study with me also tend to be driven. I’ll occasionally see that same fracturing in one of them. Exhaustion threatens to derail their progress. That’s especially true when things aren’t going well with their work. It’s very easy to be bleak when you’re overtired, and easy to be tired when you’re bummed out.

We’ve all heard that prolonged stress can contribute to a weakened immune system, digestive problems, headaches, weight gain or loss, trouble sleeping, heart disease, susceptibility to cancer, high blood pressure, and stroke. Unremitting chronic stress is tied to diminished cognitive function, so it can hinder our long-term productivity.

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Stress is a delicate balance.

Too much stress, and you break down. Too little, and you get nowhere.

We have all met ‘artists’ who go to openings and talk about the work they might do; in fact, there sometimes seems to be an inverse relationship between how much people chatter about their work and how much they actually do.

But there are other very serious artists who have a different problem. “I have the time to paint, and I want to paint,” they tell me, “But I just don’t seem to do it.” They engage in avoidance techniques, like cleaning, that stop them from ever getting started. That’s anxiety.

I finally have the luxury to be able to treat art as a 9-5 job, but before that I tried very hard to make a schedule and stick with it. Going into the studio every day at the same time encourages your mind to get down to it and not squirm around looking for an escape hatch.

“I know you’re all terrified,” a painting teacher once told my class. She wasn’t entirely right, but self-doubt can be bubbling along just under the surface, even in people who seem extremely confident. And it can blindside you when you aren’t looking.

Creativity may look easy, but artists invest incredible effort to create that impression. Art, if done right, is both mentally and physically difficult. It doesn’t get easier over time. “Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do,” said Edgar Degas.

Pull up your Big Girl Panties, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Finding a balance that works

Sustainability is about finding a balance that allows you to prosper over the long term. Unlike Hercules, we can’t enlist Hermes and Athena to assist us in our labors, so we need to find ways to regroup. (By 165 AD, Hercules’ fellow Romans were celebrating 135 festival and other holidays a year. Medieval peasants had even more days off. Our ancestors could teach us a thing or two about rest.)

Most modern people don’t observe a Sabbath, more’s the pity. It’s a gift, not an obligation.

Back It Up, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Worrying won’t make it better

I really hope that most of the time you’re painting you’re ‘in the zone,’ happily making artwork. But it isn’t always like that; as I mentioned above, making art is often anxiety-inducing.

Getting older helps if for no other reason than that we’re just too blasted tired to keep worrying. But whatever your age, try to check your anxieties, perfectionism, and other mental hiccups at the door of your studio. You’ll find you have a lot more energy to work.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: the color of fall

Autumn farm, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed.

According to the USDA, “a warm wet spring, favorable summer weather, and warm sunny fall days with cool nights should produce the most brilliant autumn colors.” We’re well on our way, having had plenty of moisture (and therefore new growth), along with balmy temperatures.

In the northeast, we’ve been seeing the first intimations of autumn for a few weeks: staghorn sumac sporting red velvety fruit, soft maples turning along the edges of ponds, and goldenrod and asters in unmowed fields.

As I look out my window, I see that the young maple across the road is turning gold on its top. It’s the perfect ombre coloring job, and Mother Nature’s been doing it for eons.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449.

This is my favorite season for painting and for sailing. The days are warm, the nights are cool, and the colors are glorious. It’s no surprise that my October immersive workshop has only two seats left.

Green matrix. The blue and black circles are much smaller because they have a higher tinting strength than yellows.

My students are familiar with the exercises I give them to mix greens, because the green matrix helps them avoid the ‘wall of green’ that’s the death of so much landscape painting. I tell them to leave out the top left mixes (yellow ochre/black and Indian yellow/black) in midsummer because they’re only appropriate for autumn. Now’s the time to add those back in, because autumn is as much about bronzes as it is about reds and yellows.

There are three pigments involved in autumn color:

Carotenoids: They give us the yellow, orange, and brown colors in things like corn, carrots, and daffodils.

Anthocyanin: That’s the pigment in apples, grapes, blueberries, strawberries and plums. It’s pH sensitive, which is why it appears to be red in some places, blue in others, and even violet or black.

Chlorophyll: That’s our basic green pigment in leaves. It’s responsible for photosynthesis, so it’s a fundamental building block for life.

Chlorophyll and carotenoids are in leaves all through the growing season but anthocyanins are produced in autumn. As chlorophyll production slows down, the reds and golds and violets in leaves are unmasked.

It’s a slow roll out

None of this happens instantaneously. It starts about the second week in August and continues until just the beech and oak leaves are rattling in the wind in November.

I like high chroma as much as the next painter, but what sets the florid coloring of the maples off are the browns and russets of the beeches and oaks, the violets of dogwoods, and the yellows of birches. Furthermore, about half the trees in the Maine forest are conifers. They’re not the same green as they were in spring; they’ll get deeper and duller as they too slip into dormancy. Convincing autumn color requires all of these.

A little exercise for you

Remember the green matrix I mentioned above? It’s still the basis of autumn color. If you’ve made one up (or in watercolor, made up a mixing chart of the same), try modifying each green with tints of the following colors:

  • Quinacridone violet
  • Ultramarine blue
  • Raw sienna

(A tint is a pigment plus white. In watercolor, you’re not going to add white, of course, but just a dash of the modifying color.)

Jennifer Johnson’s green chart. Modify the green matrix above with the addition of tints as shown.

The chart above, made by Jennifer Johnson, shows how it’s done. And when you’re finished, you’ll have a solid blueprint to paint your way through every subtle shade Mother Nature throws at you this fall. Furthermore, you have another hint as to why I paint with premixed tints on my oil palette.

Another little exercise

Quin violet and cadmium orange, surprisingly enough, make red.

Try mixing cadmium orange and quinacridone violet. Have you ever seen a natural red that’s more vibrant than this? I doubt it. Red can easily be too strong in a landscape painting, so in most field work, I just mix it.

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When automation stops being automatic

Bracken Fern, 12X9, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed.

I get lots of emails asking who hosts my website and how to make a commerce-enabled website. The short answer is, unless you need a custom-designed storefront for things like interactive classes and online registrations along with your painting sales, you’re better off with a plug-and-play website. I addressed this question in depth here.

When automation works, it’s a beautiful thing. Sales ring in the background, customers get their receipts and information, products get sent, and everyone is happy.

American Eagle in Drydock, 12X16, $1159 unframed.

When automation fails, it leaves us in a hole. In the modern world, tech support for broken apps is slim-to-nonexistent. If you doubt me, just try asking Facebook why they’ve suddenly put you under an interdict for violating a policy. There’s no human behind the system, because the system is too large to function on a one-on-one basis.

By and large that’s just fine-it keeps productivity high and costs down. But it’s annoying when you have a problem. About two weeks ago, my website and my checkout software stopped communicating. The link wasn’t broken on our end, and therefore wasn’t fixable from our end. It took nearly a week for their so-called ‘happiness engineers’ to get back to us. (I’m not making that up. That’s really what they call their poor tech support people.)

Skylarking, oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985.00 framed.

When it rains it pours.

All of this happened when I was on the road teaching, first in Acadia and then in the Berkshires. I’m all-in when I’m doing a workshop. About all I could manage was a brittle smile and a promise to do something soon.

I have an IT department of just 3/5th of a person. My daughter is taking a few years off to be with her toddler and part-time work suits her fine for now. I’m lucky to have this; most artists don’t. And it’s still taken us a long time to fix the problem.

That’s why one of the important points of this post is for working artists to choose your website’s host carefully. Don’t buy more functionality than you need; there’s just more to go wrong.

We sometimes say ‘troubles come in threes,’ but what we really observe is that events sometimes seem to gang up on us. Chance is, by definition, random. We’re potting along under a clear blue sky and then, bam, all our metaphorical tires go flat.

After the Berkshires, I was driving home from a weekend party in the Hudson Valley when I started to develop a wicked headache. It was COVID. And that, my friend, is why we didn’t have a blog post this past Wednesday. I may be tough, but I’m not superhuman.

Which is the second important point of this post: yes, COVID is back again. Unlike prior iterations, this one is said to be mild. That means that it probably won’t kill you; however, it still kicks like a mule.

Persistent clouds along the Upper Wash, 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 unframed.

All’s well that ends well.

My e-commerce seems to be up and running, so if there was anything you needed from our website, you’re good to go. And since my last go-round with COVID, we have gotten easy access to Paxlovid. I’m already feeling a thousand times better. Thanks for asking!

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: the perspective of clouds

This post first appeared in 2021, and has been edited to respond to questions from my Berkshire workshop students.

Clouds over Teslin Lake, Teslin, Yukon Territory, 9X12, available.

Clouds are not flat. The same perspective rules that apply to objects on the ground also apply to objects in the air. We are sometimes misled about that because clouds that appear to be almost overhead are, in fact, a long distance away.

I’ve alluded before to two-point perspective. I’ve never gotten too specific because it’s a great theoretical concept but a lousy way to draw. Today I’ll explain it, but it’s not how I want you to draw clouds. It’s just to understand them.

A two-point perspective grid. You don’t need to draw all those rays, just the horizon line. The vertical lines indicate the edges of your paper.

Draw a horizontal line somewhere near the middle of your paper. This horizon line represents the height of your eyeballs. Put dots on the far left and far right ends of this line, at the edges of your paper. These are your vanishing points.

A cube drawn with perspective rays. It’s that simple.

All objects in your drawing must be fitted to rays coming from those points. A cube is the simplest form of this. Start with a vertical line; that’s the front corner of your block. It can be anywhere on your picture. Bound it by extending ray lines back to the vanishing points. Make your first block transparent, just so you can see how the rays cross in the back. This is the fundamental building block of perspective drawing, and everything else derives from it. You can add architectural flourishes using the rules I gave for drawing windows and doors that fit.

All objects can be rendered from that basic cube.

I’ve included a simple landscape perspective here, omitting some of the backside lines for the sake of clarity.

As a practical tool, two-point perspective breaks down quickly. In reality, those vanishing points are infinitely distant from you. But it’s hard to align a ruler to an infinitely-distant point, so we draw finite points at the edges of our paper. They throw the whole drawing into a fake exaggeration of perspective. That’s why I started with a grid where the vanishing points were off the paper. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it less obvious.

(There is also three-point perspective, which gives us an ant’s view of things, and four-point perspective, which gives a fish-eye distortion reminiscent of mid-century comic book art. And there are even more complex perspective schemes. At that point, you’ve left painting and entered a fantastical world of technical drawing.)

Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.

Still, two-point perspective is useful for understanding clouds. Clouds follow the rules of perspective, being smaller, flatter and less distinct the farther they are from the viewer. The difference is that the vanishing point is below the object, rather than above as with terrestrial objects.

Cumulus clouds have flat bases and fluffy tops, and they tend to run in patterns across the sky. I’ve rendered them as slabs, using the same basic perspective rules as I would for a house. They may be far more fantastical in shape, but they obey this same basic rule of design.

You can see that basic perspective when looking at a photo of cumulus clouds.

Clouds form where there’s a temperature change in the atmosphere. That means a flight of cumulus clouds or a mackerel sky will all have their bottoms at the same altitude, i.e. the same plane. However, there can be more than one cloud formation mucking around up there. That’s particularly true where there’s a big, scenic object like the ocean or a mountain in your vista. These have a way of interfering with the orderly patterns of clouds.

I don’t expect you to go outside and draw clouds using a perspective grid. In fact, that would be completely wrong. This post is to help you understand the concept before you tackle the subject. Then you’ll be more likely to see clouds marching across the sky in volume, rather than as puffy white shapes pasted on the surface of your painting.

Instead, I want you to observe the plane where clouds are forming, and how you’re looking up at the bottom of it. Note the real angles of the patterns they make. You use your pencil to figure this out. Line it up with the pattern of the clouds and then mark that angle on your paper, just as you do with any object you draw. Just make sure you keep the pencil square to an imaginary glass window, as you do with the pencil and thumb method of measuring.

Drawing clouds-like everything else-is all about measuring angles and distances. But the nifty thing about clouds is that in two minutes they’re totally different. Sneaky little devils.

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Living and painting close to nature

Marty Heagney painting at Hancock Shaker Village.

“It’s going to rain in ten minutes,” I told my workshop students.

“How can you tell?”

“I feel it in my corns.”

Lynda Mussen painting under a changeable sky at Canoe Meadows.

I don’t even know what corns are, but it seemed like a nice old-timey term for a skill that’s largely lost today. In truth, I was feeling and smelling the shift in air temperature and humidity that precedes a rainstorm. Sure enough, within ten minutes, it was coming down in sheets.

It’s been a continuation of the damp weather that has wrapped the northeast in flannel all summer. My students have been remarkably good-natured despite the mizzle and occasional downpour. That’s especially true of Cassie Sano, who’s had to dry out her tent more than once.

Yves Roblin painting at Hancock Shaker Village.

“We could paint here all week!” several people said of Hancock Shaker Village. I’d heard the same thing at Undermountain Farm. We were rained out of Wahconah Falls, but I believe it would have earned similar plaudits. Instead, we were rescued by the good people of Berkshire First Church of the Nazarene, who let us use their social hall for the day. Work continued uninterrupted.

“When the leaves turn over, and the silver undersides are showing, that’s a front change, usually not good,” I told a student from California. It’s a little like what happens when you part your hair on the wrong side; the leaves are ruffled out of their usual position. I was almost right; the weather did change. However, it wasn’t another drenching, but a clearing sky.

In the US and Canada, our weather almost always comes from the southwest. You can often tell what’s coming just by looking in that direction.

Then there’s ‘red sky at morning, sailors take warning.’ It means that a high-pressure weather system has moved east. Good weather has passed, making way for a stormy low-pressure system. The first half of that couplet, ‘red sky at night, sailors delight,’ means exactly the opposite. There’s stable air coming in from the west.

This delightfully fat sow is named ‘Stormy’. Appropriate for this week.

We used to have an old-fashioned ‘storm glass’ style barometer in our living room. It told us the same thing as the rhyming couplet with slightly more accuracy: falling pressure means unsettled weather is coming.

These signs were how people predicted the weather before the National Weather Service deployed legions of meteorologists and supercomputers to do it for us. For a detailed read, I find the air’s feel and smell just as reliable as my phone. That’s particularly true in coastal Maine, where the crazy-quilt coastline tosses weather patterns around like pinballs.

I spend several hours a day outdoors, in all seasons. People who live and work in climate-controlled environments never get a chance to develop that almost-intuitive sense of weather that our ancestors took for granted. They also never get a chance to see the subtle interplay of light and color that makes nature so magical.

This little donkey didn’t find me particularly endearing. Pity, that.

In addition to rain, we’ve seen a lot of animals this week. At Undermountain Farm, there were horses, sheep and goats. At Hancock Shaker Village, there were cattle and a great fat pig smiling as she wallowed in mud. I patted a donkey and asked him if he knew why he had a cross on his withers; he trotted away. On Thursday, we watched a family of mallard ducks dabbling in a shallow pond at Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary, with their fat tails and feet sticking straight up in the air. We couldn’t help but laugh.

And all too soon, it’s over. Today’s our last day, and then we’re gone for another year. But we’ll be back; the Berkshires are magical.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Painting Massachusetts’ wilderness

Cassie Sano’s painting of Undermountain Farm’s Victorian barns.

My father was from the west side of Buffalo and my mother was born in the first ward of Lackawanna, NY. Although they were both thoroughly urban, they bought a farm in Niagara County, NY in 1965. We had cattle, horses, ducks, and a hundred feeder chickens every spring. It was a well-ordered farm when it was established in 1861, and it’s maintained its good bones right up until the present.

Although I couldn’t wait to get away, I realize now that the countryside was a great place to grow up. Most of my practical skills came from growing up on a farm.

Yes, that’s a sheep keeping my painters company.

On Monday, I taught at Undermountain Farm in Lenox, MA. It’s got 23 horses, two sheep and two goats. The sights, the smells, and even the clatter of my shoes on the wooden barn floors were a powerful nostalgic kick.

Undermountain Farm’s horse barn has restrooms, a real step up from my childhood, where we had an external well with a pump that froze every winter. There are two horses at Undermountain Farm who are free to wander. As horses will, they really just want to scarf food the easy way. They found a broken bale directly under the hay chute, which happened to be directly in front of the restroom doors.

What? You want us to move?

Their need was not greater than my need, but they outweighed me. I pushed their noses; they pushed back. Docile they might be, but they were blocking my way. Finally, I thought, ‘just move the hay.’ Problem solved.

One of the students in this workshop is the wonderful painter Cassie Sano, who hails from Augusta, ME. That’s not nearly as sophisticated as you might think; really, she lives in the woods. She’s camping here in western Massachusetts and on the first day, she was dragging.

“I was up all night worrying about bears,” she told me.

“But you live in bear country!” I remonstrated.

“But at home I’m sleeping in my house!”

I told her all the comforting bear facts I could think of. When I got back to my daughter’s house in nearby Rensselaer County, NY, my son-in-law was cleaning up trash from a bear visit. We know they’re there; earlier this year we saw a sow and three cubs on the trail cam just behind the house.

Beth Carr’s lovely painting of Waconah Falls.

My daughter inadvertently acquired a rooster this year. Besides chasing pullets around the yard, he starts crowing just before first light. That’s another sound with a powerful nostalgic kick, as is the outraged ‘no thanks!’ from a disinterested hen.

If you’ve been to Boston and New York, you know something about the northeast. Yes, it’s urban and industrialized. However, get out of the major cities and our region is rural. In many places, it’s wilderness. If you really want to know New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, you have to get out of town.

Wow

If you got an email from me yesterday, you know I’m doing an immersive workshop in Rockport in October. I wasn’t prepared for it to be so popular; as of this moment, more than half the seats are gone. I’m looking forward to sharing my beautiful town with you.

Michael Anne Lynn perfectly demonstrated the successful phases of a good watercolor: value sketch, grisaille, color tests, and a finished painting. Now that you’ve seen this, you don’t need me.

Artists, housing and one of my students.

Creative types sometimes struggle with affordable housing just like many others. A student of mine in Austin (Mark Gale) along with a colleague of his in St. Louis, are involved in finding and supporting solutions.

They are developing a panel discussion for the 2024 South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) that showcases three success. (SXSW gets national attention.) To bring this discussion to the public, though, they need votes via a simple thumbs up on the SXSW panel picker.

Here’s a bit more info.

Or follow a direct link to vote.

The Austin program where Mark volunteers and one of those highlighted on the panel is Art from the Streets: 

Voting closes 8/20, so please do it now.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: easels to avoid, and ones to love

Sadly, neither the Prius nor this easel are still with me. The easel snapped in a windstorm with one too many weights hanging from it. The Prius died of old age after 300,000 miles.

“I have been painting for two years now, primarily plein air and in acrylic,” a reader wrote. “While I’ve gotten by with a makeshift DIY easel, do you have any suggestion for a great beginner’s easel that can handle larger formats (up to 20×10)?”

I’ve written about how Google drove me toward inexpensive and fatally-flawed Meeden pochade boxes. Cheap boxes that don’t work are a false economy.

When you’re working very big, there’s no substitute for a Gloucester-style easel.

For years, I used Jerry’s knock-off of the Gloucester easel. Mine finally snapped in a high wind. The replacement was so warped that I can’t recommend it, unless you’re willing to do the work to remake the wooden parts. If you want this style easel, you need the Take-It Easel.

The Gloucester-style easel is invaluable for large work or windy days, but it’s too heavy for me to carry very far. Weight is the big reason so many artists use the Park-n-Paint approach to plein air. It’s easy, but it’s limiting.

Double-demoing with my Mabef easel to the left, my Easy-L box to the right.

Many people have been given a French box easel by loving friends or relatives. If you have one, by all means use it, but don’t voluntarily inflict one on yourself. They’re heavy and difficult to set up. Pochade boxes are lighter and nimbler.

Guerrilla Painter boxes are beautifully made, with rock-solid hardware and a heavy plywood shell, but they weigh a lot for their mixing area. I have a 12X16 Guerrilla box that is so tough I could drive over it with my truck without denting it. I never use it; it weighs too darn much.

For most fieldwork I use an Easy L box, which I have in two sizes. I’ve used them for several years, and the hardware is as tight as it was when they were new.

Terrie Perrine working in pastels on her Leder easel.

I also have the Leder easel, which at $159 (not including the tripod) is reasonably priced for a solid, stable, painting system. It can hold a canvas up to 24″ tall, which is large enough for most plein air work. You must buy your own tripod and paint box, but that has some advantages. You’re not hauling around a heavy wooden box, because you can pair it with a Masterson Sta-Wet palette box, which is far lighter . It’s also a great system for pastels, because it allows you to use your existing pastel box. In fact, you can flip between media quickly. (Ed reminds me that if you use the code Carol10, you’ll get a 10% discount.)

For watercolors, I love the Mabef M-27 field easel.  It can hold a very large board and the angle adjusts very quickly. It’s usable for oils and acrylics, but balancing a palette on its arms is sometimes an exercise in frustration. I’m on my second one; the first one died after decades of abuse.

I’m tough on my gear. This was an accident, I swear.

The New Wave u.go pochade is a simple, elegant design, although it’s really only suitable for smaller work. Its mixing area is very shallow; that’s a problem if you use lots of paint. However, the palette does lift out so you can freeze it, and it’s lightweight.

Strada makes the only aluminum pochade boxes that I know of. That’s a pity, because aluminum is less prone to moisture damage than wood. It doesn’t result in much weight savings, however.

En Plein Air Pro is well known for their watercolor system, which is lightweight and durable. Their newer oil-and-acrylic easel is equally nice.  It can take a canvas up to 22″ high. I have had one of their tripod trays for years.

The Meeden watercolor field easel is a lightweight easel at a very low price. The tripod has a narrower stance than a photo tripod, but it does fold down into a backpackable kit. I don’t think it would stand up to long-term regular use, but it’s sufficient for the occasional painter. The drawing board can hold a sheet up to 12″ high.

Rebecca Bowes won Best in Show in the 10X10 show at the Red Barn Gallery in Port Clyde. Although I’m a member of the gallery, I had nothing to do with the jurying.

Like many of my students, she’s loath to admit just how accomplished she is. Next time I tell one of you, “That’s really good,” I hope you recognize that I’m not just blowing hot air.

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Practicing polite deflection

It didn’t seem like it was going to be a crowded day when we set up. All photos courtesy Jennifer Johnson.

Acadia had nearly 38,000 fewer visits this June than it did last year, but you’d never know that from the crowds at Schoodic Point. I’d intended to bring my class elsewhere, but the winds on Tuesday produced big rollers crashing across the rocky promontory. That’s a special experience, and I wanted my students to have the opportunity to paint them.

Apparently, John Q. Public also likes the drama of big seas, and he came along as well, bringing everyone he knew with him. They came in their hundreds and their thousands, and they kept standing in my view. The nerve.

Painting on the hot rocks of Schoodic.

Life in a National Park has its comic moments. Walking across the parking lot, I heard a cranky gentleman remonstrate to his wife, “There’s nothing here but water!”

It also has its terrifying moments. Waves crashing against big rocks can be killers. I hate watching people skirting the edges of the rocks in blithe disregard of the danger, especially with their children in tow. On Monday, I saw a woman heading down the slope in her bikini. Since I didn’t read about her in the Bangor Daily News, I presume she was warned off.

And there are sublime moments. For much of the day yesterday, a big fat seal cavorted in the surf, entertaining the crowds.

Painting in public can be a wonderful experience, a way to express yourself and share your art with others. But when you’re trying to get something done, it can be irritating.

We took a short break to discuss the theories of Edgar Payne and John Carlson, because that’s how we roll.

The best defense is a good location, but there are few of those on the open rocks of Schoodic Point. Karen managed to set up with her back to a ledge of rock. That protected her from the problem another student was having. “They stand behind me, breathing loudly,” she said. That’s a slight improvement over the people who stand behind you making unsolicited comments.

My personal bête noire is the person who stands behind me saying, “that looks like so much fun!” Done right, painting is darn hard work, but we do it because the payoff is so great.

One could set clear boundaries with body language, but that’s hard to maintain when you’re concentrating. One student mused that she’s going to put a sign up that reads, “Artist at work: approach with credit cards.” Of course, they could wear earbuds, but then they couldn’t hear me.

Another technique would be a debris field. I, like many artists, am particularly good at dropping things. If I’d stop picking them up, after a few hours, I’d have a dangerous physical barrier between me and the public.

I once knew an artist who had a large QR code on his paint box. When people spoke to him, he just waved his brush irritably at the code.

In the afternoon, I did a short demo.

But I think the best technique is polite deflection. My monitor, Jennifer, has some rehearsed phrases, like, “this is a class. Our teacher, Carol Douglas, is over there.” Sometimes she even points in my general direction.

For the poor schmoes in my class, I can only suggest, “I’m really focused on this painting right now, but I appreciate your interest,” or “I’d love to chat later when I’m on a break.”

“See that woman over there?” She’s our teacher, and if I don’t finish this quickly, she’ll hit me with her stick,” however, is completely over the top.

My new class, The Essential Grisaille, is available now.

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The bones of painting, and a cute story

Watercolor grisaille by Rebecca Bense

Because I’ve been eating, drinking, sleeping and thinking nothing but grisaille recently, I decided to invert my usual lesson plan and start my Sea & Sky workshop at Schoodic Institute with a lesson on monochromatic underpainting.

We started with a soft blue sky that gradually resolved to a lovely milkiness and then to glumness as evening drew in. (It’s forecast to get downright surly before it clears.) But my students had strong value structures, which carried them over the rough passages.

Oil grisaille by Ann Haskell

Simplify, baby

Plein air painting can be challenging even without constantly changing light. By concentrating on value, my painters were able to focus on the bones of their painting without getting wrapped around the dual axles of hue and chroma. (A review of those terms can be found here.) As I wrote on Monday, value is king.

Oil grisaille by Linda Delorey

Let’s hustle

I’m writing this at 0:dark:30 on Tuesday morning as we try to figure out if and when the threatening storm will hit us. Don’t worry; I have a backup plan; in this case, it’s fervent prayer.

I normally write my posts the night before they’re published, but my students Karen and Diane have planned a cocktail party for Tuesday evening. We’re going for a short hike on the Sundew Trail before class, so I got up especially early to write.

I like speed and efficiency in painting too. I want to attack my color passages au premier coup, or at the first shot, instead of dithering about mixing and laying colors repeatedly on the same small section of canvas. That’s a surefire recipe for mud, whether you’re painting in oils or watercolor.

Demonstrating in watercolor to my intrepid band of students. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Johnson)

And then there’s the brain

Grisaille is an excellent way for artists to train their eyes and minds to observe value and see underlying composition. It helps us to become more sensitive to the nuances of light and shadow, which are crucial for plein air (and indeed, all) painting.

Remember when I said ‘value is king’? Its co-regent is composition. Every other element of painting is subservient to this pair.

Linda Smiley had just started to add color information when we snapped this photo of her grisaille.

Let’s just screw around

I do my best experimentation with either a pencil or a brush in the grisaille phase. That’s where I can figure out the texture of a blueberry barren or the shape of clouds. It’s infinitely easier and faster than trying to do it in full color.

A wee anecdote from Monday’s class

A young girl, a member of a religious sect, stopped to observe us painting. She is interested in art, so Karen explained the value of a drawing practice. “Carol draws everywhere,” she said. “She even draws in church.” She told her the kind of things I draw in church, which you can find on my Instagram feed. “You could draw in church, too,” Karen added.

“I could never do that!” the young lass exclaimed.

I’m the poster child for hyperactive inattention. I believe drawing calms me down enough to open my ears. I’m not much of a believer in multitasking, but that’s one place where I think it works.

My new class, The Essential Grisaille, is available now.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: why grisaille?

Sometimes you just need to push paint around in a dream state. A grisaille is the perfect place to do that.

A grisaille is a monochromatic painting. In oil painting, it forms the first step of underpainting. In watercolor, it’s a separate reference to check values.

There are a few painters I know who skip the grisaille step entirely. (I’m not one of them.) The only ones who are successful at it are so experienced that they can integrate hue, value and chroma simultaneously. Even then, they’re still working dark to light and being careful not to misstep and put gobs of white or light paint where it doesn’t belong.

Eric Jacobsen is one of these outliers, and he graciously offered to demo his underpainting technique for my newest online class, The Essential Grisaille. (Appearances by his dog Sugar and his chickens were completely unscripted – but cute.)

As we filmed, I kept thinking, “Kids, don’t try this at home!” Eric isn’t skipping the grisaille step so much as integrating it with his initial color notes. That’s very difficult for all but the most experienced painters.

Early in the grisaille process for the Scottish portrait I wrote about on Friday.

Why grisaille?

The human mind sees value before hue or chroma. The arrangement of rods and cones makes us more sensitive to value shifts when scanning a vista. We also have a wide dynamic range. Both were awfully convenient for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and they influence how we see paintings.

In the brain, processing starts with low-level information like brightness and contrast. That’s processed more quickly and efficiently than higher-level color information, which requires additional signals from the eyes.

Sometimes my sketch for an oil painting will take the form of a watercolor grisaille.

In a nutshell, that means the viewer will see your value structure before he or she sees anything else. A painting that fails on its value structure will just fail, period. Arthur Wesley Dow, who wrote the definitive 20th century composition book, is the guy who gave us the notion of notan. He taught students to restrict the infinite range of tonal values to specific values. He wanted students to realize that all compositions are, underneath, a structure of light and dark shapes. That’s a critical insight that influences all modern painting.

A watercolor grisaille done as preparation for a watercolor painting.

What is grisaille?

Grisaille just means a monochromatic painting. I teach both oil and watercolor students to do this preparatory step. In watercolor, it’s a monochrome study on a separate page that guides the color choices for the finished painting. For oil painting it’s the underpainting step before we start adding color.

In oils, it’s done in a dark tone that relates to the overall color scheme of the planned painting-if the shadows are cool, the grisaille should be cool, and if the shadows are warm, the grisaille should be warm. That’s because the grisaille will be part of the finished painting, sometimes visible with no covering whatsoever.

The paint is thinned with odorless mineral spirits (OMS) and no white or light colors should be introduced. A brush and a rag are both used to get the full range of values.

Even for a QuickDraw, I do a grisaille. This is partly covered with color notes. The finished painting is here.

Simple, right?

Another watercolor grisaille. All examples are by me.

I’ve just spent about six weeks writing and filming The Essential Grisaille*, and thinking through all the ways it can go wrong. Julie Hunt, who is a very good student and painter, told me, “There were beginning things I fudged with little instruction that I remember.” She has now carefully worked through every step of The Essential Grisaille to really master the subject. I’m excited to see how her painting changes.

Julie has put her finger on the difficulty of all classes, online or in person. There’s so much to take in that nobody gets it all the first time they hear it. And we can fill in the gaps with inspired guesses or just wrong-headed mistakes. It all comes down to being ready to hear, grasshopper.

Which is why Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters is designed to be open-ended. You can go back and revisit them… as long as I pay my internet bill.😊

*I’m talking about both watercolor and oils in this post, but The Essential Grisaille is intended for oil painters.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: